Believe me, as of yet we hardly know what chaos is. Imagine -- from the
perspective of Plame Week in America -- an administration whose leading
neoconservative figures believed a short few years ago that the card to
play in the Middle East was indeed chaos. They then played it in Iraq,
and it should come as no surprise that what they got in return was more
chaos than they ever counted on.
Now, a slightly altered line-up of officials in Washington threatens to
play that card again in Syria. Call it madness – or call it what passes
for American policymaking. As Paul Woodward comments at his War in Context blog,
"If there's one lesson learned in Iraq that the Bush administration
wants to apply to Syria it's that it's much easier to bring about
regime change than it is to deal with the consequences." Only the other
day, reports at his Syriacomment.com blog,
Joshua Landis revealed that National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley
called the president of the Italian senate to ask "if he had a
candidate to replace Bashar al-Asad as President of Syria. The Italians
were horrified. Italy is one of Syria's biggest trading partners so it
seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up
to." That's the "spread of democracy," Bush-style, for you. Juan Cole
suggests, reasonably enough, that the obvious successor candidate in
Syria would be the violently repressed Muslim Brotherhood and that then
a "fundamentalist crescent" might become a reality for Washington.
In the meantime, of course, chaos has been making its dramatic debut
here and, post-Iraq, post-Cindy, post-DeLay, post-Frist, post-Katrina,
post-Rita, post-Wilma, post-the Miers nomination, post (later in the
week)-Patrick Fitzgerald's indictments, a perfect storm of chaos is
threatening to blow like some category five hurricane from Baghdad and
points east back into Washington and whack the Bush administration.
(Call in FEMA!) What was that saying about those who live by the sword
and chaos…?
Historian and Middle Eastern expert Mark LeVine, whose blog can be found at the invaluable History News Network website,
has been a student of Washington-inspired "sponsored chaos" for some
time. Having just returned from the ever more chaotic Middle East, he
considers the uses of chaos in Iraq and Israel/Palestine. Tom
Where Chaos Is King
By Mark LeVine
Within twenty-four hours, on October 16-17, the New York Times
ran three stories about the threat increasing chaos posed to emerging,
still fragile political orders in Iraq, Palestine, and the Sudan. In
all three cases, the chaos afflicting these societies was described as
an unintentional and negative consequence of ill-conceived policies put
in place by the various governments involved: the U.S. in Iraq, Israel
as it withdrew from Gaza, and the Sudanese Government as it finally
tried to restrain marauding Janjaweed militias in Darfur. In no case
was the chaos viewed as intentional or beneficial to one or more of the
forces competing for control of these countries.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq in particular has been judged a failure by
its critics almost from the start because of the chaos it has
generated. Even with the approval of the constitution, "experts" are
arguing that, as long as American and other foreign troops remain in
Iraq, the situation "will become more chaotic," or in the words of Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, will continue to "destabilize the Middle East."
Of course, only angry, irrational Arabs -- in this case, Sunnis --
could desire such a state of affairs. As the Project for a New American
Century's Gary Schmitt wrote in a Washington Post op-ed,
they "could well believe that the resulting chaos and even occasional
death of a neighbor or a member of his extended family is a price worth
paying for a return to Sunni ascendancy." Similarly, last week
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee that "the enemy's strategy is to infect, terrorize and pull down."
The tolerance for disorder, it seems, is a clear sign of an archaic Muslim mentality at work. As a Marine spokesperson
explained recently, after a deadly attack on American forces, "The
insurgents are against progress and only desire a return to the ways of
the seventh century." No less a personage than Tony Blair
was in agreement. Al-Qa'eda, he claimed, is engaged in a "premedieval
religious war utterly alien to the future of humankind," whose goal,
according to his friend George Bush,
is to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to
Indonesia." Our goal is order. The urge to create chaos is not only
pre-modern, it's inherently theirs.
The problem with this narrative is that the neoconservatives, who were
primarily responsible for launching the war on terror as well as the
invasion and occupation of Iraq, have by and large not viewed chaos in
this manner. For them, chaos has been not just an inevitable
consequence of globalization, but a phenomenon that might be well used
to further their long-term agenda of remaking the Middle East in
America's image. Indeed, as they saw it, it was only natural for the
world's first true hyperpower to adopt a historically well-tested
policy of "creative destruction." Their goal, as explained in the now
famous comment of an anonymous administration official,
was to "create our own reality" wherever we tread. ("We're history's
actors," he continued, "and all of you will be left to just study what
we do.")
Such a comment might seem the height of Bush administration hubris
alone, if it hadn't also reflected the avant-garde of American business
thinking of the previous decade or more. In his 1988 book Thriving on Chaos,
for instance, business guru Tom Peters argued that Americans must "take
the chaos as given and learn to thrive on it. The winners of tomorrow
will deal proactively with chaos… Chaos and uncertainty are… market
opportunities for the wise."
The advice of Peters and of the Pentagon was taken to heart by scholars
and policymakers like Paul Wolfowitz, Samuel Huntington, and Robert
Kaplan, who in the mid-1990s began writing of a "new cold war" or
"clash of civilizations" between Islamism and neoliberalism across an
"arc of instability" stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to Central
Asia. Specifically, post-Cold War experiences in Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda,
and elsewhere in Africa called for an organized effort to figure out
how the United States could best "manage the chaos" that the coming
global "anarchy" was certain bring.
Similarly, the World Bank argued in a 1995 report that modernizing the
Middle East might well necessitate a "shake-down period" before the
region could even begin adapting to the new global economic order. Some
neocon intellectuals believed that the best way to manage such a moment
was to bring it on, to provoke a level of chaos that would be but the
prologue to a new, American-style world order. (In keeping with that
spirit, "Shock and Awe" made its debut in Iraq in March 2003, a level
of force whose very intention was to create chaos, however short-lived
it may have been expected to be.)
In this same vein, Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and Lockheed Martin leaped
to take advantage of the market opportunities presented by
post-September 11 chaos. In doing so, they helped turn the "breadth
economy" of the 1990s, in which many sectors grew at a sustained rate,
into the "depth economy" of the new millennium, in which core "old"
industries like oil, defense, and heavy engineering regained a
disproportionate share of corporate profits -- a position they are
unlikely to relinquish as long as chaos remains king in the global
political economy.
A less Pollyanna-ish view of the coming chaos was expressed in Vision for 2020,
the mission statement of the U.S. Strategic Space Command (published in
2000). Globalization, that document suggested, was producing a global
zero-sum game of winners and losers. In such a context, Americans must
prepare to do whatever it might take to "win," including, of course,
dominating space in order to "protect US interests and investment."
What the Space Command didn't mention, though it has since become a
predominant concern of the Bush Administration (as the secret files of
the Cheney Energy Task Force
reveal) is how the expected arrival of the era of "peak oil" and the
levels of global energy chaos sure to accompany it have exponentially
increased the stakes involved in controlling Iraq's immense oil
reserves. Growing competition with an energy-thirsty China and, to a
lesser extent, the European Union has only amplified this concern, and
helped produce a situation where the blowback potential from the
invasion and long-term occupation of Iraq seemed, at least on paper,
well worth the risk.
Playing the Chaos Card in Iraq
Given the chaos and violence currently afflicting much of Arab Iraq,
particularly its Sunni regions, it is hard to imagine that the Bush
Administration intended such an outcome to its long-awaited invasion
and occupation. Of course, everyone would undoubtedly have cheered if
the immediate post-invasion chaos had quickly given way to a
free-market democratic paradise along the Tigris. But while significant
parts of the chaos in Iraq have resulted from rank incompetence (or
perhaps a total lack of concern with the consequences of the policies
set in place), some of it can still be viewed as serving the interests
of Bush administration policy desires, albeit at great cost. Even with
the blowback from the chaos Bush has unleashed now creeping towards
Karl Rove's office in the White House and beginning to encircle Vice
President Cheney, we need to consider what other means this
administration might have used to achieve three of its most important
goals in Iraq:
Its first goal has long been to retain a (much reduced) military
presence in that country for the foreseeable future. The administration
is on record as saying that it will leave if asked to do so; but the
continuing chaos and conflict, largely sparked by the continued
presence of U.S. troops, ensure that the desperately weak government in
Baghdad's Green Zone, which is unlikely to survive without American
protection, won't make such a request. Its second goal is to ensure a
predominant role for U.S. companies in the development, production, and
sale of the country's vast reservoirs of oil. Indeed, the few documents
made public from the Cheney Energy Task Force revealed that concern
over losing Iraq to European oil companies, combined with China's
insatiable thirst for petroleum and fears that it would increasingly
encroach on America's sphere of economic dominance, were important
reasons for the war. If the world really has entered an era of zero-sum
competition over its remaining oil supplies, Iraq is a prize worth
shedding a lot of blood to secure -- and chaos, whatever the ensuing
pain, a strategy potentially worth pursuing.
The administration's final goal has been to continue the wholesale,
disastrous privatization of Iraq's economy – something that, as the
World Bank warned, was unlikely to be accepted by the people of any
Middle Eastern country who possessed the wherewithal to resist. It is
obviously harder for people to resist when their lives have been thrown
into chaos. In fact, most of the Middle East has avoided succumbing to
American pressures to adopt the kind of large-scale,
structural-adjustment reforms that have spread increased poverty and
inequality across the global south. As key members of the Bush
administration saw the matter, Iraq could do for neoliberalism in the
Middle East what Chile did for it in Latin America.
The vast majority of Iraqis are, of course, opposed to each of these
goals. Yet the constitution on which they just voted -- being
essentially an American-brokered document -- carefully avoided
addressing any of these concerns. It is hard to imagine that such an
end would have been possible in a more peaceful environment where
Iraqis had the public space and time to debate these important issues,
particularly when polling shows that upwards of 80% of them are opposed to the presence of U.S. troops and to the policies they are enforcing.
Perhaps Juan Cole
has best summarized how and why chaos has become a defining dynamic in
Iraq: "Iraq was," he said recently, "like a treasure in a strongbox…
The obvious thing to do was to take a crowbar and strike off the
strongbox lock."
Learning from the Israelis (as Usual)
If such planned chaos was limited to Iraq, we could perhaps see it as
an aberration rather than part of the larger dynamics of contemporary
globalization. But research on countries from Africa
to the former Soviet Union has demonstrated that chaos -- whether the
"instrumentalized disorder" in sub-Saharan Africa or the "bardok" of
Central Asia -- defines political life across an increasingly large
"arc of instability" stretching across three continents. Palestine is a
particularly good example of how chaos, or "fawda" as Palestinians term
it, can serve the political interests of an occupying power.
It has long been an open secret that the U.S. conducted extensive
training with the help of the Israeli Defense and Security forces to
prepare for the urban warfare and interrogation practices of Iraq.
While discussing the best way to ram through walls and "interrogate"
suspected insurgents, it's not unlikely that the Israelis shared their
experiences fomenting chaos to wear down Palestinian society,
particularly since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and the demise
of the Oslo negotiations.
As argues Israeli social scientist Gershon Baskin,
Ariel Sharon's policy of unilateralism in response to the failure of
negotiations has made sense to the majority of Israelis largely because
they see the "total chaos" across the West Bank and the "rule of the
gun" in newly "liberated" Gaza as demonstrating that "the PA is too
weak to rule" an independent Palestine, or even to negotiate its
establishment. What few Israelis sharing this position consider,
however, is how Israeli policies have systematically created the very
chaos that is now used as the excuse for engaging in unilateral steps
such as withdrawing from Gaza while cementing -- literally -- Israeli
control over much of the West Bank.
Yet the roots of Israel's strategy of chaos do not lie in the outbreak
of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, or in the autocratic and
corrupt policies of Yasser Arafat. Rather they go back to 1994 -- the
same year that Paul Wolfowitz, then a dean at the Johns Hopkins
University, held a conference on the "coming anarchy." It was then that
the Paris protocols to the Oslo Agreements were signed. These
agreements, rarely mentioned in discussions of why Oslo failed, locked
Palestinians into a catastrophic neoliberalized relationship with
Israel for the remainder of the Oslo process. This happened just at the
moment when Israel more or less permanently closed the Occupied
Territories. Aside from a few industries run by Palestinians with ties
to Israel, this nearly destroyed what was then a modest but growing
Palestinian economy, led to a creeping but disastrous emigration of the
country's middle class, and ultimately helped create a "severely depressed… devastated" economy that, in the words of the 2004 Palestine Human Development Report, was "ripe for corruption."
It is in the context of the ensuing decade-plus of chaos engulfing Gaza
and the West Bank that we must read the recent flood of editorials by
American and Israel pundits offering advice in advance of the coming
Palestinian elections on how the United States and Israel can help
bolster the "authority"
of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. As with Iraq's
insurgents, a combination of religious fanatics (that is, Hamas) and
"clans" and "tribes" are described as increasingly ruling a situation
in which "there is no law." And because they are depicted as the
fountainhead of the chaos afflicting Palestine, Israeli "liberals" such
as former Israeli General Ephraim Sneh can safely argue that Hamas is a
"greater threat" to Palestinians even than to Israel.
What makes this discourse so interesting is how well it has served its
purpose: With the chaos and violence of the intifada having plunged the
Palestinian economy "into deep crisis," with poverty rates in the
population above 50%, the most recent poll
of Palestinian attitudes reveals that the idea of ending the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank has become a distant dream, a fate the Bush
administration hopes will be replicated when it comes to the idea of an
America-free Iraq.
In one of his periodic attempts to bolster public support for the
occupation, President Bush offered the following ad-style summary of
American policy in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down." This
may be easy to say but it will remain exceedingly difficult for Iraqis
to stand up as long as America looms over them in a whirl of chaos.
Chaos-as-policymaking is a perilous undertaking, even for the globe's
lone superpower. In the end, the chaos unleashed across Iraq by
Washington might just topple America's latest imperial incarnation. For
now, however, neither the Bush administration, nor chaos is likely to
be a stranger to Iraq.
Mark LeVine, professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture,
and Islamic studies at the University of California at Irvine, is the
author of a new book, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil (Oneworld Publications, 2005). His website is www.culturejamming.org.
Copyright 2005 Mark LeVine